43. Le Paradou
Eating at Le Paradou last night was a little like making dinner the night before you go on a long vacation—you’ve gotten rid of most of your food so you have to piece together a meal, but at the same time you just try to eat or drink whatever you have left. In their defense, the restaurant is closing for good in a few days, but for how grossly overpriced this restaurant is, they could have run down the street to Harris Teeter to pick up some provisions. My friend Meagan and I actually tried to eat there for lunch, but the restaurant apparently stopped serving lunch a few weeks ago. Since we couldn’t get by with cheaping out with lunch service, we decided to eat at the bar. On their website, they had a bar menu with small bites that were half the price of the dining room menu. Perfect! When we were checking out the “bar menu” though, we noticed that prices were pretty steep. That is when our friendly bartender told us that they had stopped serving the bar menu a few weeks ago too, and that we would need to order off the dining room menu. So much for our money-saving tips. Though the restaurant was lacking in options, the booze was certainly flowing. After checking out the wine list and realizing that most of the choices were out of our price range (we actually thought the wines by the glass prices were for the whole bottle), we cheaped out and ordered the least expensive choice—a $15 glass of Sancerre. It must not be a popular choice, because the bartender kept refilling our glass throughout the meal, muttering “we have to get rid of it” each time. So we ended up drinking almost two full bottles between us. In the end, a deal! Since the prices were a smidge out of our intended range, we ended up getting three appetizers between the two of us. We were interested in the Lobster Purse (especially because we thought it sounded dirty), but they were out of lobster. So, we ended up with the Scallop and Langoustine with hunks of crabmeat, Crab Mousse and the Foie Gras and Poultry Boudin Blanc. All the dishes were good, if very small, especially if you really like butter. The Boudin Blanc was my favorite, it was almost like a molded sausage (sounds gross but is not), and tasted like dessert. And it had sautéed apples with it, so I got my fruits and vegetables for the day. I’m always sad to see a good restaurant close, but it seems that Le Paradou got left behind when Jose Andres and company funkified the Penn Quarter area. If I were living in Bonfire of the Vanities, it would be a great place to meet mistresses and talk about Huey Lewis, but alas those times have come and gone. Au revior, Le Paradou!
